HIS HD6870 IceQ X Turbo X Details

In this section we shall take an in-depth look at the HIS HD6870 IceQ X Turbo X video card and see what makes it tick.

With the cooler assembly and other heatsinks fully removed we can get a better look at the board, The overall layout of all the components is a little different with the 6000 series, the standard layout has moved the power phase/VRM section to the left hand side of the GPU, into an area that is normally left somewhat unoccupied. All in all the PCB looks good with no real waste of space and the soldering quality is of a very high standard as you will see in the close-up shots further down the page.

The back of the PCB is utilised mainly for resistors and the soldering quality is excellent for such tiny components, man loses the war to the machine when it comes to detailed work like this. These days you don't generally see RAM on the reverse side of a 1GB video card design thanks to the smaller manufacturing process that allows more density in a smaller package. There are a few points of interest that we will look at in more detail in this section.

The HIS HD6870 IceQ X Turbo X uses 1GB of Elpida W1032BABG GDDR5 Memory rated 1250MHz (5GHz effective) at 1.5V.

For voltage control HIS have utilized a CHiL CHL82414-01 Dual output 4+1 phase PWM Controller. Below is a snippet from the product description.

The CHL8212/13/14 are dual-loop digital multi-phase buck controllers and the CHL8203 is a single-loop digital multiphase buck controller designed for GPU voltage regulation. Dynamic voltage control is provided by registers which are programmed through I2C and then selected using a 3-bit parallel bus for fast access.

The CHL8203/12/13/14 include CHiL Efficiency Shaping Technology to deliver exceptional efficiency at minimum cost across the entire load range. CHiL Dynamic Phase Control adds/drops active phases based upon load current and can be configured to enter 1-phase operation and diode emulation mode automatically or by command.

SOURCE: chilsemi.com

The uP6122AF from uPI Semiconductor provides voltage control to the I/O buffer.

Two uP7701U8 (above and below) voltage control chips are present, one on the front and one on the reverse of the PCB. Specifications for these chips are not readily available but there is a good chance that they are an improvement on an older design. They provide voltage control for the GPU.

One can only speculate as to why there are two controllers but they may not be both performing the same task. When we look at the vital statistics of this video card in GPU-Z we see lots of extra info not normally seen on this level of card. For instance, instead of just a regular vCore reading we get readings for 12V line quality, VDDC usage in volts and VDDC current usage in amps.

A uP6101BU8 is somewhat of an older chip seen on much earlier 4000 series AMD Radeon video cards, provides voltage control for the memory.

The Pericom PI3HDMI4 chip controls the HDMI and DVI interfaces. Seen on a lot of Radeon video cards, this is likely to be the main reason why AMD video cards can support more than two monitors whereas NVIDIA cards can only support two max.

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